The Role of Sox4 In Prostate Cancer Metastases
Abstract
High-throughput sequencing of polyA+ RNA (RNA-Seq) in human cancer shows remarkable potential to identify both novel markers of disease. We employed RNA-Seq on a cohort of 102 prostate tissues and cells lines and determined whether dysregulation of SOX4, a transcription factor, associates with disease. We found that SOX4 is upregulated in prostate cancer and associated with genes characteristic of embryonic stem cell gene signatures. To probe these gene signatures for extensively for new RNAs associated with disease, we performed ab initio transcriptome assembly to discover unannotated ncRNAs. We nominated 121 such Prostate Cancer Associated Transcripts (PCATs) with cancer-specific expression patterns. Among these, we characterized PCAT-1 as a novel prostate-specific regulator of cell proliferation and target of the Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 (PRC2). We further found that high PCAT-1 and PRC2 expression stratified patient tissues into molecular subtypes distinguished by expression signatures of PCAT-1-repressed target genes. Taken together, the findings presented herein identify PCAT-1 as a novel transcriptional repressor implicated in subset of prostate cancer patients.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 2011
- Accession Number
- ADA560517
Entities
People
- John Prensner
Organizations
- University of Michigan